With a popular Egyptian revolution unfolding in front of us, I thought I'd provide a little Egyptian background info. I'm not going to get into what the United States should do or should not do, because we don't control Egypt. Our options are limited. We can withhold aid and make a plea for human rights, but Egyptians will determine the future of Egypt, not us. Contrary to the belief of some, we don't run the world.

The best thing Jimmy Carter accomplished as President was to broker a peace deal between Israel and Egypt in 1979. That might be the only good thing Carter accomplished as President, but it was significant. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin received the Nobel Peace Prize for that peace treaty. You can tell it was a good treaty by who hated it - the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), the Arab League, and assorted Islamic jihadists. The peace treaty was hated by the people who didn't want peace. Following the treaty, Egypt was suspended from the Arab League for ten years, and Sadat was assassinated in 1981 by members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad. While Egyptian Arabs still consider Israel the enemy, there have been no armed conflicts between the two nations in the subsequent 31 years.

President Obama gave his State Of The Union speech last night. In this speech, we met a new Obama, a more centrist sounding Obama. I found myself agreeing with most of what he said, with a few glaring exceptions. I also was thinking about what a different tone this new Obama has taken when compared to the 2008 candidate Obama. I was wondering, has he grown into the job he was so clearly unqualified for two years ago ? After all, nothing beats experience, and this new Obama has been President for two years now. Perhaps Obama has learned on the job. He's a smart guy. Or perhaps Obama is just another politician, who is adjusting to political reality and trying to position himself to be re-elected in 2012. Decades of listening to politicians change like the wind leads me to believe that might be it. Maybe it's a combination of these things. Only time will tell.

Because I assume you all listened to Obama's speech last night, I'm going to highlight the other State Of The Union speech given by Republican Paul Ryan. First, Ryan describes our problems:

There's so much happening on the political front that I couldn't settle on which issue to write about today. So instead, I'll write about all of them.---Birther News: Hawaiian governor Neil Abercrombie said he wanted to put to rest all the craziness surrounding President Obama's birth certificate, so he set out to prove once and for all that Obama was indeed born in Hawaii. However, I fear his findings will only increase the volume of the Birthers (link):

met·a·phor -noun1. a figure of speech in which a term or phrase is applied to something to which it is not literally applicable in order to suggest a resemblance, as in “A mighty fortress is our god.” 2. something used, or regarded as being used, to represent something else; emblem; symbol--------------------------------------------------------------------

Following the Tucson shootings, our professional media quickly reached the conclusion that metaphors were the root cause (i.e., Palin's metaphorical "crosshairs" map, Palin using the word "reload" metaphorically, Palin's face appearing on metaphorically-shaped television screens, etc). According to a recent CNN poll, a plurality of Democrats believe Palin's metaphors are partially responsible for the Tucson shootings (in related news, a plurality of Democrats also believe their computers are living beings, unlike their fetuses).

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons. - Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the U.S. Constitution

This is the infamous passage in the original Constitution that counts slaves as three-fifths of a person. Because yesterday was Martin Luther King day, it seems like a good time to bring this topic up. Almost every time I hear a reference made to this part of the original Constitution, it is offered up as proof that the Founding Fathers were racists. It is offered up as proof that they considered blacks to be subhuman. A caller to the Glen Beck radio program made this typical assertion:

I hate to get into this kind of tit-for-tat comparison of recent politically-connected violence, but I feel I must do it, due to some myths floating around the media about alleged right-wing violence. I'm not saying there is no right-wing violence, because extremists can pop up anywhere on the politiical spectrum, but because our media offers absolutely NO balance in this area, and focuses almost solely on the political right while barely even reporting violence on the left (and usually whitewashing it when they do report it), I feel I must provide some of that balance here. Also spurring this post is the mass hysteria that seems to be taking place in left-wing circles since the Tucson shootings.

Literally minutes after the Tucson shootings, the media magically created a connection out of thin air between the the shootings and Sarah Palin's crosshairs map targeting Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and others for defeat in the 2010 elections. As profoundly dishonest as it is to suggest Palin was somehow advocating violence with that map, the media was undaunted. They embraced their dishonesty, and heaped blame on Palin, despite a complete lack of evidence. Tucson's Democratic Sheriff Dupnik joined in the clue-less chorus, blaming "violent" rhetoric and conservative talk radio for the murders, although Dupnik admitted he had absolutely no evidence to backup his claim either. 'Facts ? We don't need no stinkin' facts', bleated these dishonest media whores.

What has been the result of all this fact-less blame casting aimed at Palin ? Oh, irony of ironies, the unbased hatred appears to have further endangered Palin's life:

While the media attempts to spin the murders of 22-year old Jared Lee Loughner as being the product of right-wing speech, many facts are being carefully hidden from view. Most of those facts lead one to believe that Loughner is a left-winger.

First, we have the fact that a former classmate called Loughner a "left-wing pothead".

The senseless and tragic shooting of eighteen people by the 22-year old, mentally unstable Jared Lee Loughner has left six dead and twelve wounded. It appears the target of Loughner's insanity was Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), who remains in the hospital with a gunshot wound to the head. I'm sure I reflect the feelings of everyone when I wish Giffords the very best and a complete recovery. May God be with her.

When I first heard of this tragedy, my initial reaction was shock and sadness. Secondary to that was my hope that nobody would attempt to reap base political gain from this grisly event, regardless of what the motivations of the shooter turned out to be. Fat chance.

The new Republican-led House voted to repeal ObamaCare yesterday by a vote of 236-181. It was a bipartisan effort, with four Democrats joining Republicans in the repeal effort....oh alright, it wasn't very bipartisan at all. The repeal legislation will now move on to the Democrat-led Senate, where it will die. Even if it did somehow pass the Senate, I think I can say with confidence that Obama will veto repeal of his signature legislation.

Democrats have been trumpeting the fact that ObamaCare will reduce the deficit by $230 billion over ten years. Republicans are extremely skeptical of that figure. The Beacon Journal ran a New York Times article on friday supporting the notion that ObamaCare would reduce the deficit. Because the article left out a lot more than it explained, allow me to elaborate.

The federal government is currently over $14 trillion in debt. In two-three months, Congress will have to raise the $14.3 trillion debt limit or the federal government will begin to default. Such a default would wreak economic havoc on our nation. Many Republicans are demanding spending concessions in return for raising the debt limit. They want to put a plan in place to balance the budget over time in exchange for raising the limit. I call this the sane position. Some other Republicans and conservatives want to draw a line in the sand and vote against increasing the debt limit at all (Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) is circulating a petition against raising the debt limit). I call this the insane position. We will have to raise the debt limit, no question. There is no way to go from a $1.3 trillion deficit to a balanced budget in two or three months. There isn't even a proposal on the table to do that. Republicans have been calling for a $100 billion spending cut in their first year controlling the House, and frankly, I'd be surprised if they even accomplished that much when the GOP doesn't control the Senate or the Executive Branch. We will NOT be balancing the federal budget in 2011. You can take that to the bank (preferably a Chinese bank).

The Obama administration has cautioned Republicans against "playing chicken" with the debt ceiling. I call this the other insane position, because it tacitly endorses business as usual, which has produced $5.2 trillion in new debt over the last four years of Democratic congressional rule. Spending restraints should be put in place. A plan to balance the budget MUST be put in place. We cannot continue on our current path of irresponsibility. That would wreak havoc on everyone's future.

When President Obama took office during the depths of the recession, unemployment was 7.6%. Now, two years later, after trillions of dollars of Keynesian-style government spending to stimulate the economy, unemployment stands at 9.7%. Millions of jobs were lost as we simultaneously accumulated trillions of dollars in new debt. That is failure on a colossal level, but, unbelievably, Democrats call their Keynesian policies a success. Even more unbelievably, some liberals are calling for more of these same failed policies, as I noted in my previous post.

And Democrats wonder why they lost the elections in november. My liberal friend the Reverend thinks it has something to do with Fox News. Duh.

When I wrote a post titled Economic Lunacy on December 23rd, the federal government was $13.89 trillion in debt. This morning I discovered the federal government is now over $14 trillion in debt. That means we've accumulated over $100 billion in new debt IN TWELVE DAYS. In the upside-down bizarro world of Obamaland, this means our President is "essentially a Blue Dog Democrat," as the New York Times reported Obama saying of himself privately. In case anyone doesn't know what a Blue Dog is, it's a fiscally conservative Democrat. If we're going to start pretending Obama is a fiscal conservative, we may as well start calling Sarah Palin a socialist, because words no longer have meaning.